Imagine

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Please don’t give in to your urge to rush through your book. The more time you put into it to familiarize yourself with all the characters, sceneries, understand all occurrences… the more lasting joy you’ll get out of your books.

Despite this, though, there a fair amount of useful material in a book that is generally an easy read. It just isn't the masterpiece that it seems to think it is.

John & Yoko had hired very skilled and experienced sound engineers who used high quality equipment and knew how to mic and record onto tape with great expertise, so the technical quality of the recordings was also excellent. Many of those mics are so good they are still in use today. Lehrer's evidence for his surprising claim bashing brainstorming is a psychology study with groups of 4 or 5 undergrads, and no facilitator or special tools, working on an assigned topic they probably don't care about. This is a biased, unfair test of brainstorming because: the group is too small, there is a certain skill to managing a brainstorming session so that people follow the rules and kids just being told to do it will not have this expertise, and the point is to share ideas about a problem that people want/need to solve. Despite these monkey-wrenches, the "brainstorming" group still did do better than the controls! A third group did even better by "debating" but this is another straw-man argument because in practice the idea generation of brainstorming is always followed by some kind of winnowing process. Nobody anywhere is proposing that one should implement all of the hundreds of ideas generated by a brainstorming session. Nor would one reject new good ideas that come up during the winnowing. The premise of Imagine is theologically flawed and spiritually dangerous. That premise is that deep down man is GOOD. If man is "bad" it's because of "external" notions that he's brainwashed with by society. Notions such as good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust, truth and lies. Strip away these external notions of absolutes and what you're left with is a purer, cleaner, ultimately GOOD man. With your favorite books, you probably won’t mind taking extra time painting vibrant details into landscapes and making characters as lifelike as real people. Imagine John & Yoko – The Elliot Mintz Interviews John & Yoko in conversation with the legendary broadcaster

This is an entertaining book because its ideas are counterintuitive. The problem is that the reason the ideas are counterintuitive is that they are wrong. There were no set rules for any of the selections, really. It was just per song – what did we feel would be nice to isolate or show off, that might have escaped people’s initial listening experience.First sentence: Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us, only sky. Imagine all the people living for today. Move to a large city to boost your creative productivity 15 percent on average. This is due to the increased number of random encounters with all kinds of people.

So far, so good. But I do have some issues. For me the 'practical' creative aspects of the book work much better than the 'arty' side. In the end, to an extent, this is inevitable because the arty side is so subjective. Jonah Lehrer (any relation to the very creative Tom? the bio doesn't say) positively drools over how wonderful and creative Bob Dylan is. I find Dylan boring, pretentious and anything but creative. So that's a whole chunk of the book that turns me off. You can't argue about the creativity of a new product or invention - you certainly can about art. On the other hand, the book does explain why Silicon Valley became innovative after the development of electronics. There are a couple of reasons, all having to do with the sharing of information among engineers there. They tend to have after-work drinks at a small number of watering holes. Non-compete clauses are not enforced there. And, there is a high rate of turnover among the technically skilled engineers. Next, you could add smell and touch to add just another layer of depth to your movie scenes. The more time you take to draw out all these perceptions from your book, the more rewarding your experience.On ‘Crippled Inside’, we thought we’d have just the drums and that slap bass sound with the delay on it. It’s such a great groove, we wanted people to hear that. Saying something is true, doesn't make it true in reality. Therein lies the danger. You can say 2+2=5 because I want it to be 5 and not 4. But that doesn't make it so. You can argue it many different ways. I feel oppressed by the idea that 2+2=4. I feel free and liberated when I say 2+2=3 or 2+2=5 or 2+2=18. I don't want anyone telling me that 2+2=4 is the only true answer. Why can't 2+2=7 be just as true as 2+2=4? Why isn't 7 just as good a number as 4? Who are you to say that 7 ISN'T as good as 4? You do math your way, I'll do math my way. After all what difference does it make?! Live and let live, right?!?! For this to happen, Lehrer argues that there are some meta-ideas, prevailing societal conditions that lead to more creativity. Richness of language, horizontal connections rather than vertical (e.g., across companies rather than within one) are two conditions. Lennon later explained that the song "should be credited as a Lennon/Ono song. A lot of it – the lyric and the concept – came from Yoko, but in those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted her contribution, but it was right out of Grapefruit."